Five Thrilling Upcoming Political Events (and Two Past Events)

Two weeks from today, I become part of the vast Rupert Murdoch media empire, and I’m admitting that here for all time so that no one accuses me of hidden conflicts of interest if I absent-mindedly blog in the future about some other part of the empire — such as:

•the Wall Street Journal, a great issue of which happens to have just been summarized by Sean Dougherty for your convenience on his great PR/media/politics blog, or

•TV host Sarah Palin, who addresses a (modern) Boston Tea Party on the 14th, just before Tax Day — and in the process (even if her abandonment of her Alaskan governorship proves her unfit for higher office) likely summarizes the attitude of most Americans toward taxes far more effectively than does our current president, no matter how many sentences she might mangle (and for more political debate-talk, remember to join us for the healthcare dust-up at Lolita Bar this Wednesday at 8pm)

If all this is too “establishment” for you and you need purer, more libertarian stuff, though, you’re in luck — one week from tonight is the Manhattan Libertarian Party’s April 12 debate and candidates forum, reports their head honcho Ron Moore…

That same night, though, I will be attending an advance screening of the realistically-violent superheroes-without-powers comic book adaptation movie Kick-Ass (thanks to Kyle Smith)…

And if neither liberty nor violence is your thing, you also have the option of going to the Columbia campus that night to hear Dawn Eden give a talk on “theology of the body,” in part covering what John Paul II thought about sex…

I’ll be at Columbia myself one month from tonight, doing my third and final fiftieth-anniversary reading of Ayn Rand’s speech “Faith and Force: Destroyers of the Modern World.” Yesterday, to Dawn’s dismay, I gave the speech on Easter morning, but next month I’ll merely be giving it on Cinco de Mayo, which I hope won’t offend anyone too badly…

My thanks to Gerard Perry for navigating my trip to his old Brooklyn College stomping grounds yesterday — you can see him speak at the aforementioned ObamaCare debate at Lolita this Wednesday — and my thanks in advance to anyone at Columbia willing to help just a tiny bit with the set-up of my May 5 speech, which I haven’t actually, you know, gotten permission for or anything yet. I’m just assuming it will all work out as smoothly as my speech at Yale in February under the auspices of the Party of the Right and the Objectivist Study Group at Yale did — unless Yale is better than Columbia, of course.